Embassy Wife

by Katie Crouch

  “Quite a place,” Amanda said.

  Persephone tilted her head, testing the air for snideness. She’d given up being self-conscious about assigned residences long ago. It wasn’t her fault that the allotted housing for State Department employees in Namibia allowed for a thousand feet per family member, a pool, a recreation area, and a garden. A State Department family living in a mansion while assigned to Africa was normal. Slightly less normal was the herd of life-sized bronze rhinos scattered throughout the garden. (A Chardonnay-fueled, questionable purchase made during the auction portion of the Marine Ball.)

  Amanda was inspecting one now.

  “You really do love rhinos,” she said.

  “I’m crazy about them. They’re so … sexy.” Persephone flushed. “Or something. And people keep killing them here. It’s maddening. I’d love to just sit out there in the bush with them and pick off any poachers who came along.”

  “You run that by the ambassador yet?”

  “Not as such. But let me tell you, rhinoceros bodyguard? It’s my dream job. Here … let me show you around,” Persephone said, leading Amanda away from the sculptures and up a flight of stairs. “This is the terrace. Breezy, isn’t it? My colleague Margo holds yoga classes here sometimes. I’ll get you on the WhatsApp list. Come in. Here’s the kitchen, the living room, the other living room, the kids’ wing…”

  She gestured grandly at the white-tiled floors, the cavernous rooms, the State Department furniture. Did she enjoy pretending she was Zsa Zsa Gabor at such moments? Maybe, she would later admit to her Afrikaans therapist, who would nod sagely and murmur, Shame.

  “Mimosa?”

  “Sure,” Amanda said. Persephone handed Amanda a bottle of cold prosecco and grabbed a box of Ceres and two glasses. She’d intended to sit by the pool, but Elifas, the gardener, had already sealed it up after the weekend, and basking next to a blue plastic tarp didn’t have quite the same effect. Instead they settled under the lapa, where Persephone prepared to deliver her standard Incomings speech. (Homesickness is normal, there’s a nurse who prescribes at the Klein Windhoek Pharmacy, go to the back of Woolworth’s for almost-American tasties and decent wine.) Yet Amanda dug in first.

  “So who was the gorgeous woman who gifted you that carcass?”

  “It was an oryx.” Persephone paused and took a sip, the bubbles pleasantly tickling her nose. “And that was Mila Shilongo. Classic government wife. They’re from up north. Completely corrupt husband.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  Persephone rolled her eyes. “Because they’re rich as King David. I mean, really, I heard they jet off to the U.S. and stay at Canyon Ranch once a year. What are they doing that could earn them a fancy house in Klein Windhoek and a game ranch?” She fiddled with the strap on her shoe, making a mental note to rein herself in. Gossip was strictly against her rules. “I’m just saying, if there’s any government money that’s not going towards the roads, it’s just criminal. More people die in car accidents here than any other way.”

  “I believe it. Mark was in an accident, too. Back when he was here in the nineties.”

  “Oh, that’s right. We knew that.”

  “We?”

  “The point is,” Persephone went on hurriedly, “Minister Shilongo is in charge of all roads, and the international trucks who use those roads. There are all sorts of fees they have to pay, and someone’s getting them.” She adjusted her ponytail. “Also, she’s been in charge of this fiasco called International Day for years. I want to run International Day. I just know I could show them how to do it and actually make money. Oh, and I forgot to mention that Mila has a real thing for my husband.” Hmmm, she thought. Perhaps she was getting close to gossip territory now. “But she can be very nice, too.”

  “Sounds like you adore her.”

  “Well.” Persephone turned to fluff the outdoor pillows on her chair, concentrating on acting as if all the information Amanda would tell her about herself was news. For one of the things Persephone definitely could not tell Amanda was that a file about each new embassy family was circulated among a disclosed few, which, naturally, included Persephone. She knew that Amanda was forty-one—old for an Incoming. She knew that little Meg had been attending private school. She knew that Mark had been in the Peace Corps but had to go home because he was in some sort of bus accident. She knew that now Mark was working on a PhD and researching the turn of the century concentration camps on Shark Island. And she knew that Amanda had worked for a large tech company, that she was very good at it, and now she wasn’t working at all.

  She added a tad more champagne to her own glass.

  “And how are you settling into Windhoek?”

  Amanda shrugged. “I’m fine. You know. It’s a disruption, but we’re up for it. Or I’m up for it. My daughter, not so much.”

  “Meg?”

  “Oh!” Amanda raised her eyebrows. “I hadn’t realized I’d mentioned her to you.”

  “You must have,” Persephone said hurriedly. “Back at school.”

  “Yeah, well. I had to promise to buy her a trampoline just to get her out of the car this morning.”

  Persephone grunted, looking at the spoils of her own children: trampoline, badminton court, pool volleyball net, and the Jonestown colony of dolls splayed grotesquely across the Astroturf.

  “And what are you going to do? While you’re here, I mean. Will you work?”

  Amanda looked a bit hopeless, suddenly. “Looked into it, but the visa process won’t work.”

  “Well. There’s a lot here for Trailers, anyway. I can get you involved in anything. International Women’s Association … Society of Diplomatic Spouses…”

  “Wait. Trailers?”

  Persephone looked at Amanda, perplexed. “Trailing Spouses.” Hadn’t this woman been briefed on anything? “That’s what they call us. Officially. Spouses who follow State Department workers to different posts.”

  “That’s so belittling,” Amanda said, screwing up her face as if she’d eaten a bad pepper.

  “I guess I’ve gotten used to it. It makes me feel…” Persephone paused, weighing her words. Adam would chew her out if any negativity got back to him. “Less lonely, I guess. In my situation. I mean, I could have a job at the embassy, if I wanted to. Angie, the security officer’s wife, is a receptionist. And Aaron, whose wife is another doctor at the CDC, he works as a driver. But I’d rather…” She stopped again. Do nothing? Supervise Elifas, who was more competent than herself at everything? “Be with the kids.”

  “Why don’t they just call us Sandbags?” Amanda mused. “Or Deadweight?”

  “That’s not really…” Persephone changed tack. “I think of it as being part of the most overqualified stay-at-home moms’ and dads’ club in the world. I mean, Kayla’s an architect. Shoshana’s a psychologist. Margo’s a midwife. You’re a manager.”

  “COO.”

  “Right. Back home, if I were a housewife, I’d be surrounded by other ladies who obsess over making school lunches and going to barre class. Here, I guess we do that, too, but everyone’s really smart. Even if we are really smart at doing nothing.”

  “Well,” Amanda said, sitting up slightly. “I won’t be doing nothing. I’ve already made connections with an organization over in Katutura. For orphans, foster kids, that kind of thing. They want me to help them manage the place part-time.”

  “They said that?” Persephone asked, trying not to laugh. “That they want you to … manage?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what is it called?”

  “Um…” Amanda reached for her phone. “Our Hope Children’s Hostel. Actually, what time is it? I’m supposed to be over there at ten. Hey, I better go.”

  Persephone gathered herself and rose to escort her guest out. “Well … great! Let me just get the gate for you, darling. And let me know about that meet ’n’ greet!”

  “Thanks,” Amanda said. “And thanks for the mimosa. It’s nice to have a friend in a stran
ge land.”

  Persephone patted her arm, practically glowing. Community liaison duty for the day, aced!

  “Byyyyyyye!” she called as she watched Amanda’s Subaru slide into the street. She did feel badly about sending her new friend into a den of wolves as hungry as the Our Hope Children’s Hostel. Poor Amanda Evans was not in for a good morning.

  Ah, well. If she was excited about it, who was Persephone to bring her down? It was not the job of the Embassy Wife to dampen anyone’s enthusiasm. Diplomacy was tricky, after all. You had to break the new ones in slow.

  / 3 /

  Mark Evans had always been a star. He walked with the easy gait of those used to being looked at; he spoke with the humble self-assuredness of a boy who knows his future will be better than most. Preordained, his mother said sometimes, to the annoyance of his only-slightly-above-average brother and sister. Standing six-foot-three and filling out at two hundred and ten pounds, Mark had been both the varsity basketball and lacrosse MVP of his high school. He’d then been recruited by Brown to play lacrosse, only to be poached by the crew team, because they had a shorter season and better parties.

  Mark’s four years at Brown had been effortless and legendary, marked with aced premed classes despite leading his boats to victory at countless weekend regattas. His entrance into med school was assumed. Instead, to his parents’ annoyance and worry, Mark chose to join the Peace Corps. He was such a well-known senior in the Class of ’95 that the news caused a ripple through campus, which both alienated him from the other athletes and, to Mark’s delight, opened a whole new range of bedroom doors of socially conscious eco-hotties.

  That summer Mark was dispatched to Namibia, a place no one had ever heard of. His luck seemed to turn as soon as he set foot in the country. In Mark’s family’s mind, it was as if he were disappearing into blank space. He sent them long, boring letters of his progress at the health clinic where he had made the important decision, he told them, not to become a doctor. And then he had gotten into a bus accident. (“He was riding buses!” his mother shrieked. “In Africa!”) But this, after all, had turned out to be a good thing, because—to the family’s great relief—he’d been sent home early.

  Mark’s mother never fully understood what had occurred in that horrid country, but when her son returned from Namibia in 1997 to take up residence in his high school bedroom, he seemed, she whispered to her closest friends, “a bit broken.” He was, of course, though he wouldn’t be able to admit it until many years later. The accident had shattered his leg, and everything else.

  As the dull, housebound weeks dragged on in Highland Park, he wondered at all that had happened at home while he was gone. It was like he returned to the movie of his life and everyone else had pushed fast-forward. Both of his college girlfriends were engaged. His former Brown roommates were VPs at various Wall Street firms; Mark didn’t know what that meant other than they seemed ridiculously rich and confident. His parents were older, his siblings more self-involved. He skulked in his mother’s house for two months, suffering the shame inflicted by his mother’s friends when they asked what he was doing with himself these days. His classmates still living in HP couldn’t believe it. Mark Evans, that cocky prick, had fucking boomeranged? Finally he couldn’t stand it anymore. He went to Boston to stay with James.

  While Mark was away, James had finished his master’s degree in history at Harvard in one year, and now was moving on to his PhD, focusing on homosexuality in Nordic Viking culture. Mark still felt too numb to care much, but he was impressed by James’s lifestyle. His friend had his own handsome cubby in the Widener Library and a cozy room in a house in Somerville where other good-looking graduate students came and went, drinking wine and talking about politics and cooking communal stir-fries. James had been his one friend that he knew, someday, would really make it. He was able to turn everyday happenings—band performances, pot-laced study groups—into sought-after events. Mark couldn’t imagine how James would spin a PhD in history into something grand, but he was impressed with the fact that his friend had a purpose. Over beers at Grendel’s, he confessed his envy.

  “You can do it, too, man,” James said. “You should. You were always better at school than I was. I had all Bs in history.”

  “So how did Harvard happen?”

  “Prof Chapman at Brown? He loved me. Like, inappropriately. And Harvard liked my angle. Who else writes about gay Vikings? No one. That’s what it’s about. The angle.”

  “But you’re not gay,” Mark pointed out.

  “Who cares? I could be. It’s my angle.” James looked at him thoughtfully. “Yours should be something Jewish.”

  “What? What does that mean?”

  “You’re, like, the best-looking Jewish guy ever. You could be, like, the Jewish Sebastian Junger.”

  Mark drew a circle in the beads of moisture on the outside of his beer. “How do you know Sebastian Junger’s not Jewish himself?”

  “Isn’t there something in ancient Israel that interests you? You could search for some ancient scrolls or something.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve been twice—”

  “Teen Tour?” James grinned.

  “Maccabiah Games, fuck you very much. The Israelis are kind of rude. The country didn’t speak to me.” He paused, looking at a pair of girls playing with the jukebox. While he was away, the waistline of the jeans women wore had plummeted to the lower hip. One of the girls was wearing a yellow thong; it snaked up above her belt loops. At one time, this would have propelled him either to make an opening remark or, if that seemed too difficult, to head to a bathroom stall to whack off. Now it just made him want to cry.

  “I liked Namibia,” he finally said.

  “No one knows or cares about fucking Namibia, Mark. You’re not going to sell a Namibian history course to Yale. Don’t you speak Spanish or something?”

  “French. And Ovambo.”

  “Do France. Jewishness and France. The Holocaust is big. It’s like, Schindler’s List legitimized the fucking thing.”

  “My grandmother was an Auschwitz survivor, you ass. It’s always been legitimate.”

  “Yeah, but now it’s popular. That’s what’s important. Don’t look at me like that. It’s 1997, and colleges are trying to sex up. A good-looking TA working on a thesis about the Jewish French Resistance, or whatever? You can sell that.”

  Mark spent the next month sneaking into the Harvard libraries with James’s card and researching Jews in France. He put together an article entitled “Neighborly Death Sentence” and submitted it to a history magazine, which, to his delight, ran it. He sent it around with his application to schools. Dartmouth admitted him into their PhD program, and, because of his All-American crew status, said he could make extra money as the assistant coach.

  Dartmouth. It was a place someone like Mark Evans was made for. Brown had felt like a female school to him, with her soft lawns, cozy brick buildings, and lax, loose curriculum. Dartmouth was a male place, tough and square, and it threw its fatherly arms open for him, then pushed him gently forward, encouraging him to heal. At first Mark hurled himself into his studies. He had a ridiculous amount of time, which reminded him of the Peace Corps. He was supposed to spend it working in the library, which he did, in his own private study office. Then Father Dartmouth gave him grants to go twice to France, where he did some interviews and poked in archives and learned about Burgundy wine.

  Everyone knew it was officially against Dartmouth policy to date students. Everyone also knew, if you were a man, this rule was meant to be broken. Besides, the decree made the sex with undergraduates even more exciting. The last woman Mark had loved—the one who’d pushed him into this chasm—was measured, wise, and shy. The trajectory away from her was to grasp for anything but; hence the subjects of Mark’s attention at Dartmouth were uniformly tall, blond, willowy, arty, and completely unreasonable. They hated that he had to leave their bed at 4:00 a.m. to coach; they couldn’t stand that every weekend was spent on riv
ers and lakes at other campuses.

  During his second spring in Hanover, Mark fell in with a senior, a sailing team champion named Whitney. She was blond, of course, but she varied from the others in that she understood an athlete’s schedule and had a wry sense of humor. She’d also grown up in a mansion in Darien that had once belonged to Charles Lindbergh, had a trust fund that she dipped into regularly for trips with Mark to New York and Montreal, and was truly filthy in bed.

  Mark was pretty sure, in his entire life from now on, that he would never find a better partner in the world than Whitney Chase. That spring, she graduated, and, instead of following her friends to New York, moved to Vermont with Mark. She was gone half of the time at international regattas, which Mark appreciated. Then Whitney returned one frigid April day, radiant from a J-24 victory in Malta, with news. She was leaving him for an Olympic dinghy sailor named Hans.

  “Dinghies?” Mark said. “Even the sport sounds stupid.”

  “He’s a silver medalist,” she said impatiently. “Anyway. Mark. You’re great. But you’re really unfocused. Frankly, my loser alarm has been going off for a while now. And you’re obsessed with ‘what you went through’ in Namibia. Which is boring.”

  “I went through a lot in Namibia,” he said. “I can’t talk about it. But Whitney, people died.”

  “Boring,” she said.

  It took her leaving for him to realize it. Mark was no longer a god. He was a human person and, yes, Whitney was right. A loser, in the literal sense. He had lost something he would never get back, and the ghost of that happening was creeping through the rest of his life. Whitney leaving was proof. Mark had never been left by a woman before. He couldn’t believe the hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach, or how the empty drawers where Whitney’s clothes had been made him cry. He still made it to practice, barking orders through the megaphone from the motorboat. Other than that, he’d lain on the sofa, drinking whiskey. He was becoming really fond of whiskey.